By Rhys Jaggar
Well, the Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain saga says it all, doesn’t it?
£14m for a 17 year old tested only in League 1. But penny-pinching over an England international who’s proven in the EPL. Who plays in a position Arsenal need to strengthen, rather than attacking midfield in which Arsenal are over-populated.
Given that Southampton negotiated a sell-on clause, it might reasonably be assumed that the young man intends to be educated at the Emirates on a healthy wage, then play his real football somewhere else.
So £14m for a squad player for 2011/12, eh? Who said Arsenal were short of cash?? Or is this replacing Walcott before selling him either now, in January or in the summer?
What I think the argument needs to move to is this: where do returns on transfer outlay come from?
Well, it’s more complicated than you might think.
1. Sell-on transfer fee. The obvious one. The one which explains buying younger players.
2. Selling shirts and being the commercial face of some deal or other. Well, that’s usually best done by stars.
3. Increased prize money from EPL, ECL etc.
That usually means the team doing better. Which implies senior players with no resale value may be increasing revenues by meaning Arsenal finish 2nd not 4th and get to the semi-finals, not last 16 of the Champions League. You do that two years running and a £15m fee for Jagielka is repaid. Thing is, how do you prove it was down to him? Wenger likes certainty. You get it from an individual transfer fee. You don’t from a team bringing in more prize money. What do the fans think?
4. Commercial revenue due to winning trophies.
The money bandied about by Man Utd and Barcelona on the value of winning the Champions League is out of all proportion to the prize money. So by winning the EPL or ECL, you might add quite a bit more onto the returns on a player. Although again, proving it was them alone isn’t easy. Do the fans care??
Who benefits from each type?
Well, the money men and the shareholders benefit from all of them. but the fans only benefit from points 3 and 4. They benefit from those by seeing their team win a trophy. Or get closer to winning a trophy. So the fans would like transfer policy to be aimed at winning trophies, but also ensuring that when those trophies are won, the Board do their job to cash in on that success commercially.
So, if I were the CEO of Arsenal, I’d lay it on the line to Wenger about the financial returns from winning trophies.
If he says, You can buy the players but we won’t win the trophies, I’d ask Why?
Because there’s only two reasons: he’s buying the wrong players, or he’s no good as a manager of good players.
Assuming everything isn’t already fixed in advance. Which I hope to believe is not the case.
If Wenger is now saying: ‘I’m only comfortable turning promising youngsters into established internationals’, then he needs to find a club happy for him to do that.
Because Arsenal fans paying the highest ticket prices in the world aren’t. And as we all know, there’s no guarantee of players upping their resale value is there? Some do, some don’t. Fabregas will, Nasri might, Bendtner may not, Clichy was marginal.
Go read the fans comments on the Daily Mail site story on AOC: I’d say 80 – 90% are against Wenger, although 30 – 40% of that would forgive him if he buys proper defenders before close of business. Almost no-one is defending him.
Perhaps Mr Gazidis should read those comments.Because if no further deals are done, I suspect the fans will have spoken.